Design, analysis, and performance evaluation for BICM-ID with square QAM constellations in Rayleigh fading channels

We consider bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) for bandwidth-efficient transmission over Rayleigh fading channels. We propose the design criteria that utilize a large Hamming distance inherited in a low-rate code and a new labeling technique designed specifically for fading channels. This results in a large coding gain over noniterative coded modulation and performance close to that of “turbo” coded modulation with less complexity. We also show that BICM-ID designed for fading channels usually has a very good performance over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel while the converse is difficult to achieve. When combined with signal space diversity, diversity order can be improved to twice the diversity order of conventional BICM-ID; therefore, the code complexity can further be reduced while maintaining the same level of performance. Specifically, with the bandwidth efficiency of 2 bits/s/Hz over Rayleigh fading channels, a bit error rate (BER) of 10^-6 can be achieved with 16-QAM, a four-state rate 1/2 code at E_b/N₀ of about seven dB. We also derive performance bounds for BICM-ID with and without signal space diversity over Rayleigh fading channels, which can be easily extended for other types of fading channels